The subject matter disclosed herein relates to turbine buckets and, more particularly, to pressure management of cooling passages within such turbine buckets, such as those employed in gas turbine engines.
Turbine buckets are often cooled with a cooling flow of fluid that is routed throughout regions of the turbine bucket to manage extreme thermal conditions that the turbine bucket operates under. The cooling flow is typically exhausted radially out of a tip portion of the turbine bucket into a main flow path of the turbine. However, static pressures on turbine buckets, such as a first stage bucket, of a lightly loaded turbine can impede the ability to have a sufficient pressure differential between the cooling flow within the turbine bucket and the main flow path at the location of cooling flow exhaust. Such a situation leads to an inability or reduced ability to obtain sufficient motive force for the cooling flow to be expelled to the main flow path.